


Neither Can Live (While the Other Survives)

by SailorSol



Series: Children of Prophecy [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, Hogwarts Seventh Year, Post-Canon, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3167663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorSol/pseuds/SailorSol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione isn’t an ordinary student.</p><p>This is her seventh year and she is eighteen and has no interest in being head girl. The child who had stood at the front of the hall all those years ago was long since gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neither Can Live (While the Other Survives)

**Author's Note:**

> Just something I threw together. All errors are mine.

Hermione isn’t an ordinary student.

She hasn’t been in many years, truth be told, but this year especially so.

The first years look so young and _tiny_ and Hermione can’t quite believe she had ever been that small, had ever been that wide-eyed and innocent and _naïve_. This is her seventh year and she is eighteen and has no interest in being head girl. The child who had stood at the front of the hall all those years ago was long since gone.

It feels weird, in some ways, because none of this was like she had ever imagined. Even in the recent past, she would not have expected to be sitting here, Neville on one side and Ginny on the other as the three of them ignore the awed looks from the younger students.

She is glad she isn’t the only one from her year to return; glad that it isn’t just her and Neville, though it was hard sometimes to think that some of the missing faces were of the dead and not just those who chose not to return.

Malfoy has returned as well, but he doesn’t speak to anyone, and Hermione makes no effort to speak with him. Too much stands between them, least of all the permanent mark on her arm his aunt gave her.

She goes to meals and attends classes, camps out in the library as she writes essays, and has to remind herself while climbing the stairs to the dorms that the room she thinks of as hers, as Lavender’s and Parvati’s, now belongs to those children who had never seen death.

Her grades are decent, but if Hermione has learned anything in the last year, it is how to pick her battles. She takes Arithmancy and Runes, Potions and Herbology and Charms, Transfiguration and Care of Magical Creatures. She drops Defense and History; she knows far too much about both, has spent too much time living them, and knows how little she could gain from either class.

She signs up for Muggle Studies.

During her third year, when Hermione was still trying to prove something (to the world, to herself), she had taken Muggle Studies. It had been disappointing, for all that Professor Burbage (rest in peace) had been a sweet-tempered woman who had reminded Hermione of one of her primary school teachers.

Hermione was unsurprised that she was the only upper year student taking the class. Ginny would go pale beneath her freckles and Neville’s eyes would go hard when Hermione even brought up the name of the class, for all that it was now being taught by Penny Clearwater. She understood, on an intellectual level, but of all the scars she carried, that was not one of them.

Penny had spent most of the last year on the run as a Muggleborn. She didn’t talk about her time in hiding any more than Hermione did. Instead, the two of them would Floo to the Leaky Cauldron and slip out into Muggle London. Sometimes they would go to museums, sometimes they would go to the cinema, sometimes they would just walk around Kensington Park and watch carefree families play.

It was an escape, in some ways; no one looked twice at Hermione. She was just another university student taking a break from studying, another young woman taking her gap year, anonymous and insignificant. She would have chafed at that description years ago, but now she wraps it around her like a winter cloak.

(Neither of them mentions the importance of knowing how to navigate the Muggle world, of blending in or knowing the best escape routes through Piccadilly in the afternoon.)

Sometimes she leaves Hogwarts on her own, or with Neville or Lisa Turpin or Susan Bones. Sometimes Ginny or Luna will come with them, and no one stops Dennis Creevey from tagging along. The professors don’t try to stop them, don’t warn them of risks and dangers, don’t remind them of rules and decorum. If the professors tried to stop them, they would leave and not come back; these walls would no longer hold any of them.

(And Hermione does not think how she may once have thought of them as _the adults_ , not _the professors_ , that she had stopped thinking of them in those terms sometime after Bill and Fleur’s wedding as she and Harry and Ron sat huddled in the cold and dark parlor of Grimmauld Place.)

She doesn’t think the sixth and seventh years have ever been given this much freedom, doesn’t think there has ever been this level of parity between staff and students. They are peers, warriors who have stood side by side and faced pain and death and loss together as equals.

No one under fourth year understands, not truly; some of them had been at Hogwarts the previous year, the older ones will even remember Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape. But they had been sheltered from the war, as best as Neville, Luna, and Ginny could manage. They would have a normal year of house cups and Quidditch games and Hogsmeade visits, of feasts that didn’t end in terror (and oh how long ago it felt now, her first Halloween here, and Hermione is once again reminded of how she has never been a normal student, not truly, that they had all been marked by Tom, had all been unable to live while he still survived.)

And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? That was why Hermione had come back to Hogwarts despite the mountain of job offers, despite Ron and Harry staying in London to study as Aurors, despite all the good she could (should?) be doing out there.

Hermione would never know what it felt like to be an ordinary student, but she would use all of her knowledge and power to make sure that the younger students would have a chance to be children, to _live_ without the threat of dark lords and mad men lurking in the shadows.

She had never wanted to be an ordinary student anyway.


End file.
